Call for two consultants to conduct research on resilience in African countries using FAO’s DIEM dataset

The Food Security Portal (FSP), facilitated by IFPRI, aims to provide improved food security for the world’s poor and increased resilience of global food systems against food and financial crisis. The project brings together international, regional, and country-level data, news, and research aimed at meeting countries’ immediate food security needs, as well as building long-term global food security. The FSP is designed to pool information in structured ways to ensure data quality, timeliness, and relevance, as well as the opportunity for collaboration among policymakers, development professionals, and researchers. The Food Security Portal (FSP), together with the Africa South of the Sahara Food Security Portal (FSP-SSA) sub-portals, available in English and in French, provides global and country-level information on food prices and policy developments. It features a comprehensive suite of research-based capacity-strengthening tools and risk monitoring systems to help guide appropriate, timely policy responses.

The proposed research seeks to address a critical and increasingly urgent challenge across the African continent: the growing prevalence of multiple, overlapping shocks that undermine household food security and resilience. These shocks—ranging from droughts and floods to food price inflation, health crises, and conflict—are seldom experienced in isolation. Rather, they tend to cluster in ways that create compound vulnerabilities, intensifying their overall impact and accelerating the descent of affected households into chronic food insecurity and poverty. Despite the increasing recognition of this multidimensional risk landscape, the prevailing tools used for food security monitoring and social protection targeting remain narrowly focused. Most systems rely on either single-shock indicators or national-level aggregates that fail to capture the complex interplay of risks at the household level, particularly among marginalized populations.

The Food Security Portal (FSP) aims to help fill the critical gap through research that replicates and scales the Multi-Shock Index (MSI) methodology across multiple African countries included in the FAO’s Data in Emergencies Monitoring (DIEM) initiative. The MSI offers a groundbreaking framework for quantifying compound vulnerability by integrating both observed shock incidence (non-parametric index) and predicted probabilities of shock exposure (parametric index) using household-level data on livelihoods, coping strategies, gender, education, and geography. This dual-index approach enables the construction of empirically validated, normalized indicators that are both sensitive to acute crises and robust for longer-term resilience planning.

The Food Security Portal seeks two qualified consultants to conduct research on household vulnerability to compounded shocks and food insecurity using the Multi-Shock Index (MSI) methodology and FAO’s Data in Emergencies Monitoring (DIEM) dataset on either Ethiopia, Somalia, Burkina Faso, Chad, DR Congo, Malawi or Mozambique. These are intended to generate comparative, evidence-based insights to inform adaptive social protection and early warning systems.

Using this call for applications, the FSP will identify two individual consultants who will each work on DIEM date from one of the African countries identified above and produce at the minimum a technical paper and a policy brief for the country based on a research application of the MSI methodology. Further guidelines for the small grant are available here and an example application of the MSI methodology for Nigeria is available here.

Deliverables: Technical report and policy brief of the assessment of impacts of multiple shocks applying the MSI framework and using DIEM data

Duration: This consultancy will take place from June 2025 – September 2025.

Required qualifications of the consultant

• Masters or doctoral degree in Economics, Agricultural Economics, Public Policy or related field

• Research experience on topics related to food security, resilience, safety nets

• Experience in data collection, data management, and analysis

• Excellent statistical and econometric skills

• Demonstrated experience in report writing

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills

• Fluency in English

Preferred qualifications of the consultant

• Familiarity with FAO’s Data in Emergencies Monitoring (DIEM) initiative

Required Application Documents

Please include the following in your application:

• Cover letter

• Curriculum vitae

• Writing sample related to for econometric s price monitoring report.

• 2-page proposal on the application of MSI and DIEM on a study for one of the focus countries.

In the event of any questions, please contact IFPRI-FSP@cgiar.org.

Application deadline May 15, 2025